Sunday, 24 January 2016

Yet More About Berlioz

I hope all this stuff about the great Hector Berlioz is not
boring my readers. Well no actually I couldn’t give a nun’s wimple if it is; what’s the point of having a blog if
you can’t write about whatever you like?

Since before the time of Bach, keyboard proficiency, indeed
often virtuosity, has been the general rule for composers. In this as in so
much else Berlioz was an exception; he couldn’t play the piano for toffee. He
could play the flute a little, also the guitar; he had a very nice guitar which
had belonged to Paganini, small-bodied as they often were at that time. (Guitars,
not Violinists; don’t be silly.) Nevertheless, he knew the abilities and
limitations of just about every instrument you can think of, and several that
you can’t. In fact he wrote a big (but eccentric of course) book on
instrumentation; how best to use all these instruments in orchestral writing.
Even so, he sometimes went awry: having just written a long exposed passage for
trombone in D flat major — that’s five flats; I think it might have been the
magnificent solo at the beginning of the second movement of the Symphonie
Funèbre et Triomphale — he panicked and dashed out to accost a passing
trombonist and ask if playing it were feasible. The trombonist laughed at him,
though not of course in the cruel way Harriet Smithson had done, and assured
him that in fact D flat was quite a comfortable key for the trombone; the usual
tenor instrument has, as it were, two flats ‘built in’ already. (I could
explain that, but it would need a longish essay on the history of brass
instruments.)

Among the instruments you probably can’t think of was the ophicleide, which I mentioned the other day.
But I think this must wait; I know you have pathetically tiny attention spans.
Oh and you like pictures; here is a trombone: